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“Are those urns?” the voice demanded.
“Oh crap,” Susan said, her voice inaudible over the wind and waves. She tilted her head down and caught glimpses of both urns through the whipping mass of hair. There was no more dust coming out of them. She switched the one in her left hand to hold it under her right arm, then pushed hair away from her face. She forced herself to face the owner of the outraged voice.
The man was about her age, wearing black sweatpants with the legs pushed up to just below his knees. His feet were bare. He wore a T-shirt with the name of a middle school and a golden eagle printed on it. His short hair riffled in the wind. Gray dust clung to every part of him. He wiped some of the dust from his face, looked at his hands, then shook them.
Susan had the insane urge to laugh hysterically over what had just happened. But that was not the right response. That would be bad. So bad. The giggles bubbled in her stomach and pushed up into her chest. She clamped her teeth shut and swallowed, trying to push them back down, down, down into the darkness of her body before they burst out. Her hair blew free from her restraining arm and streamed in front of her again, hiding her face and, hopefully, the grin that did manage to break loose.
Fighting to control her mirth, Susan trudged through the shallow sea water and shifting sand toward the man. When she was close, she began apologizing. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Oh my gosh, I’m really, really sorry. The wind was blowing my hair and I couldn’t see, but I didn’t think there was anybody else on the beach. There wasn’t anybody else a minute ago.”
“I was there,” the man said. “I was waiting to see if you’d move so I could collect the starfish.” He pointed a dusty gray arm to a spot a few feet from Susan’s flip-flops. There, a large pink starfish lay exposed on the golden sand. He’d dropped a small plastic bucket and Susan could see another starfish, more tan in color, plus a handful of shells spilling out of it.
“I’m so sorry,” Susan said again. “You’re covered in ... in ...” A small giggle leaked from between her teeth. “My mom and dad,” she said, and she did laugh then. She slapped her empty hand over her mouth.
The man’s face passed from disgusted to confused to a smile. He shook his head. “I guess I blocked their journey back across America,” he said.
“You ... you understand why I emptied the urns here?” she asked.
The man shrugged his right shoulder. More dust slipped off him and disappeared into the wind. “It makes sense. It’s something I would do, I guess.” He brushed more dust off his shirt, then took the bottom of the shirt and fanned it back and forth. More dust came off and blew away. “Your parents, huh?”
Susan nodded.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she said. She watched him pat dust off his pants, then wipe it off his arms. He ran fingers through his hair and bits of her mom and dad showered out of the brown hair and onto his shoulders. Susan giggled again and he smiled in response. “I’m really sorry,” she offered again.
“It’s okay. I’m sorry I yelled,” he said. “I do think I might have swallowed a little bit of them, though.”
Susan clamped her hand over her mouth again to stifle the laughter. “That’s kind of gross,” she said, moving her hand away just enough to speak.
He motioned at her other hand. “What do people do with those after scattering the ashes?”
Susan looked down, the motion setting her hair to whipping around her face again. The bronze urns seemed diminished now that their precious contents were gone. She took her father’s urn from under her arm and held it in her hand. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll probably just put them back on the bookshelf at home.”
The man nodded, still patting ashes off his sweatpants. He bent down and pushed the contents of the plastic bucket back inside. He stood the bucket upright, then swiveled over and scooped up the starfish he’d wanted, stiff from being exposed to the sun all day, and he added it to his bucket. The new starfish was too big and only partially fit into the bucket, with a third of it still over the rim.
“What are those for?” Susan asked.
“My classroom,” he answered. “I’m a science teacher back in Oklahoma.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Susan said, unsure how else to respond. Most of the ash was off the man, but not all. She felt guilty and embarrassed. “Well, umm, I’m really sorry about the ashes.” She shrugged the empty urns in front of her. “I guess I should take these back up to my hotel room. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Sorry I yelled about it.”
“You were justified,” she said. “It was kinda gross.” She looked back down at his bucket then back up to his face. “Good luck with your beach stuff.”
“Thank you,” he said, and he smiled at her. He had a good smile. Nice, straight teeth, white, but not like he was so vain he bleached them. He wasn’t a bad-looking man. “Have a good day.” It was awkward and he knew it, his crooked grin showing he did.
Susan smiled again. “Bye,” she said, then bent to pick up the urn lids and her flip-flops. When she straightened, he was already moving away down the beach.
The wind still blew off the water, pulling at her clothes and hair, pushing her toward the stairs made of railroad ties that led up the bank to the hotel parking lot. The ocean breathed in and out, sending its waves pushing up the beach toward her feet. Seagulls cried and swooped. The few tourists who had been out on the beach earlier were mostly gone as the temperature beside the water went down. The man with the little blue bucket kept walking, occasionally stopping to toe at something in the golden sand.
Susan went up to her room, wrapped the urns in the towels that had protected them on her drive from Wyoming, and packed them back into her suitcase.
She had splurged on the hotel room, getting one with a massive king-size bed, a fireplace, and a lavish sliding glass door that opened onto a little balcony. She had always wanted to see the ocean, and she knew this might be her only opportunity, so she wanted to make the most of it. She opened her sliding door and stepped onto the balcony, leaning onto the wooden edge with her crossed arms. The wind caught her hair again and she wished she’d remembered to pull it back, but at least now it was blowing behind her.
The view was breathtaking. The sun was a butterscotch disk hovering above the glistening horizon. As she watched, the orb went from yellow to orange to red as it slowly descended below the line of restless ocean as far out as she could see. Somewhere to her left, a lighthouse began with a regular, lonely call that carried over land and sea.
Susan didn’t realize she was crying until the first tear fell onto her arm. She sniffled, realized she was being silly, but didn’t care. She let the tears come as she watched her first sunset on the coast. Her parents would have loved this, she knew. They’d deserved to see it. They had saved all their lives, planning to travel in their golden years, to get a big RV and drive from coast to coast, seeing all the scenic places America had to offer. It wasn’t fair they had died before that happened, most of their savings eaten up by medical bills. They’d seen the end and paid for the funerals ahead of time. Susan had inherited enough to pay off her car and finance this trip to release their ashes.
She tried to console herself by thinking of the ashes of her parents, swirling and mingling together in the wind from the ocean, blowing back across Oregon, Idaho, Montana, over the Rocky Mountains, passing their old home in Wyoming, then across the Great Plains to the Mississippi River. Her dad would like the idea of his ashes making “that worthless son-of-a-bitch president” sneeze at one of his outdoor parties. Susan gave a hiccup of laughter as she thought about her dad saying that.
Mom would no doubt want some of her ashes to settle in a rose garden to become part of the soil and nurture the flowers. She had carefully grown big, satiny-soft yellow roses in her own garden for as long as Susan could remember. They had been her pride and joy and there were often people from town driving past their house to admire the roses, which always seemed to have water like fresh dew on their brilliant petals.
Only a sliver of sun, blood-red and alien looking to the landlocked woman, remained visible when Susan dried her tears and went back into her room. In the bathroom, she washed her tear-streaked face and tried to brush out her hair, but that was nearly hopeless, so she pulled it up into a messy bun, then put on a pair of jeans and a short leather jacket to go in search of a real seafood restaurant.
As she approached her car, she could see that there was something wrong with it. The front end seemed off kilter somehow. Then she saw that the tire on the driver’s side was completely flat. Her heart dropped into her empty stomach. She braced herself and walked around the front of her Ford to see that the other front tire was half flat.
“Dammit,” she said, her voice somewhere between a curse and a whine.
“Yeah, that’s going to be a problem,” a man’s voice said behind her.